A lot of action for the last six seconds of any basketball game, let alone one at the high-school level.

But Methacton managed to keep it all straight Saturday afternoon, with a 53-51 victory over Phoenixville in the Pioneer Athletic Conference’s Final Four playoffs to show for it.

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Zach Jenkins had the eventual game-winning basket for the Warriors in the back end of the boys’ semifinal doubleheader at Spring-Ford. But the game wasn’t secured until both teams called for timeouts three times in a three-second span, then saw the Phantoms miss a shot at the buzzer as the final three ticks went off the clock.

“That was a long three seconds,” Methacton’s Brendan Casper admitted afterward. But the reward for surviving it was Methacton (20-3) getting to defend its PAC-10 title Tuesday, where it faces Perkiomen Valley — a 65-52 winner over Pope John Paul II in the first game — for the championship back at Spring-Ford.

Phoenixville’s hopes to force a tie in regulation time rested on the shot Marcus Howell took after getting the inbounds pass. But it clanked off the rim as time expired, thwarting the Phantoms (11-12) in their first Final Four appearance during head coach Randy Reber’s three-year tenure atop the program.

“They made the last shot, and we didn’t,” Reber said in summarizing the game’s outcome. “We played 32 tough minutes, with a possible tough play at the end.”

The game matched Methacton’s control of the boards — a whopping 31-14 advantage — and Phoenixville’s lights-out shooting from 3-point range. With the Warriors holding a 22-2 edge off the defensive glass, the Phantoms countered with 52.4 percent (11-for-21) accuracy from the far side of the arc.

“With the rebound discrepancy, we had no advantage inside,” Reber said. “So we had to shoot 3s. We did what we had to do.”

That proficiency enabled Phoenixville to not only keep pace with Methacton, but to lead at various points in the first three quarters.

The Frontier Division second seeds, who got 19 points from Howell and 15 from Greg Hughes, won the first quarter 18-16, then went to locker room at the half up 28-27.

In a back-and-forth third, Phoenixville came away with another one-point (39-38) edge even while Casper (game-high 20 points) scored twice in a 57-second span of the final two minutes.

“They came out with a ton of confidence, and got clean looks early on,” Methacton head coach Jeff Derstine said of the Phantoms, who saw Hughes hit three times from 3-point range in the first quarter. “We talked about doing a better job on the perimeter, because they were kicking the ball out for open looks.”

Methacton managed to go ahead in the first 2˝ minutes of the fourth quarter, scoring 10 unanswered points spanning the two frames. Casper bookended a pair of baskets around Matt Forrest (18 points) banking home a shot at the 6:21 mark.

The Warriors took a 51-47 lead into the game’s final two minutes, but were unable to expand it when Casper came up empty on a trip to the free-throw line. In the meantime, the Phantoms pulled even with 49 seconds to go after Eric Wallace made a layup and DeAndre Gadsden swished a jumper.

That set the stage for the final frantic six seconds. Reber called that timeout first, then followed suit three seconds later.

His description of the game plan for the final drive was simple.

“Marcus makes the shot,” he recalled, “and if he can’t, go for a backdoor screen. We thought they’d get something different against us.”

But Derstine, not seeing what he wanted to see from his team’s defensive positioning, countered with a final timeout to make necessary adjustments.

“In the last three seconds, we knew they were going to try and get the ball to Howell,” he said. “I thought we did a great job ... I was proud of how our kids played.”

Casper just missed a double-double for the game, his nine rebounds all coming at the defensive end. Jenkins had eight in complement to his 11-point showing.

“We had to win the boards,” Casper said, “because they (Phoenixville) were scrappy on the offensive boards. We had size on them.”

NOTES: All but two of Phoenixville’s rebounds came at the defensive end. Howell got four of his team-high five off Methacton’s glass. Howell’s all-round solid game for the Phantoms included a team-high five assists and two steals. Prior to the final six-second flurry of activity, Methacton had called a timeout with 44 seconds left and the game tied at 51. “We wanted to get the last shot in regulation,” Derstine said of that strategy session.”